Liadnan

Currently reading At the Bottom of the Garden: a dark history of fairies, hobgoblins, and other troublesome things by Diane Purkiss (fellow and tutor in English at Keble). It's a fascinating book, and written in a surprisingly personal tone, describing the riddle posed to Gawain in The Wife of Bath's Tale ("what do women want") thus:
This was the question which notoriously baffled Freud, and Gawain seems less well-equipped than he to find out the answer. He goes from house to house desparately accumulating answers: it's rather like reading six feminist polemics in a weekend
and talking about the fears of childhood and motherhood from her own experience as a mother of two living and one dead child:
To this day, fairies are considered a girl's thing. My son's ballet teacher refused, at his first lesson, to let him dance with a tinselly, spangly wand like the rest of his class, issuing him with a sword and the stern injunction 'little boys can be princes, not fairies

Reads more like a tutorial than the fairly well-researched and academic work it is: I'm not sure I could cope with all academic or even soft-academic books being written like this but it's a refreshing change.

Plus she ends by talking about X-Files and Buffy slash, which amuses me.